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Oslica 1 Amy Oslica English 4995 Race, Class, Gender View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Missouri: MOspace Oslica 1 Amy Oslica English 4995 Race, Class, Gender & Property in Women’s Writing of the Harlem Renaissance By the 1920s, although slavery had been abolished in America decades before, many social, economic and legal inequalities remained between whites and blacks. This is well-known United States history, although to many, it still exists as a rather vague idea, all too easily over-looked, as the injustices are hard to personalize. Many black women writers in American history strived to bridge this gap by providing stories of black women whose life stories were deeply impacted by all of the types of inequalities that existed. Two of the most well known of these authors are Zora Neale Hurston and Jessie Redmon Fauset. These women, with their similarities and differences, put a face to the modern black woman through their story telling. Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God , as well as her two short stories, “Spunk” and “The Gilded Six-Bits,” provide an interesting comparison to Fauset’s novel The Chinaberry Tree and her short story “Emmy.” In order to make assumptions about the authors and their works, it is important to understand their backgrounds and personal histories. Hurston and Fauset’s personal stories add to the uniqueness of their works and greatly influenced them. As Sharon Jones wrote: Not only does their work reveal the complexities of tripartite race, class and gender relations, but their lives and the challenges they faced as writers all call attention to the double jeopardy of being black and female in pre-Civil Rights Movement America as they forged ahead in their desire to rewrite the American literary landscape” (2). Oslica 2 Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891 and spent the majority of her formative years in Eatonville, Florida, “the first incorporated black township in the United States and the setting for most of her fiction” (Bomarito 89). Despite her humble background, Hurston was dedicated to furthering her education and attended Howard University as well as Barnard College, where she met Franz Boas, an anthropologist for whom Hurston did field work. Hurston’s love life was relatively tumultuous, none of her relationships lasting. She was married twice, both marriages ending in divorce. All the while, Hurston continued writing, but was largely forgotten until Alice Walker rediscovered her works in the early 1970s, “launching a Hurston revival” ( Their Eyes 219). Jessie Redmon Fauset, on the other hand, grew up in Philadelphia “in cultured by economically poor circumstances” (“Jessie Redmon Fauset”). She was extremely well educated, and attended Cornell University after officials from her school of choice, Bryn Mawr, “obtained aid for her to go instead to Cornell University” (“Jessie Redmon Fauset”). Fauset continued her education and received a Master’s degree as well. Fauset married when was twenty-nine, and stayed with her husband until his death in 1958. Her involvement in the Harlem Renaissance was very focused around being an editor for various publications, most notably as literary editor at W. E. B. Du Bois’ magazine Crisis . As with Hurston, Fauset’s achievements went rather unacknowledged, and arguably, she is “an example of an extremely admirable person who made the most of her opportunities but whose modesty and selflessness prevented her from becoming a major American literary figure” (“Jessie Redmon Fauset”). Previous scholars have looked at the works of Hurston and Fauset (although particularly Hurston) and noted the overall importance that race, class and gender play for the women. The main difference between the works of the women is the space in which Oslica 3 the women in their works live. Hurston’s heroines’ lives exist in the rural South, usually in Florida, meaning that her works evoke the more folk aspect of the black experience. On the other hand, Fauset’s setting is more focused around middle and upper class families in the North. Hurston may have gained more momentum than Fauset because, “writers whose work seemingly reflected bourgeois or proletarian strains remained marginalized and devalued or dismissed as inauthentic representatives of African American experience (Jones 4). The fact is, the folk aesthetic employed by Hurston created a stereotype of the black experience that was not necessarily the complete story, which Fauset fills in with her own style. The issues faced by Hurston’s heroines and Fauset’s heroines were very similar, despite differences in their socioeconomic statuses. The fact that Hurston chose to emphasize the Southern, folk culture of black Americans may be controversial, and does play a role in the way that the audience perceives her characters. When Their Eyes Were Watching God was first published, “the first white reviewers saw Hurston’s use of dialect as a strength of her writing, while important black reviewers criticized Hurston for submitting to white stereotypes” (Heard 132). Dialect is used in all of Hurston’s works and it works to place the characters in time and space. The use of dialect is a double-edged sword — it can both empower and degrade black culture. Fauset, in her embrace of middle class, Northern black culture, does not employ any form of dialect for her characters. Critical literature has done little to address this. While Hurston is accused of “submitting to white stereotypes,” Fauset writes about characters whose color is arguably the only thing that separates them from the dominant white culture of America. Heard writes, “Although Hurston attempts to meet the standards of her white culture, she does so without abandoning her dialect or any Oslica 4 other characteristics of her home culture” (146). This begs the question: What role does assimilation into white society play in the works of Hurston and Fauset? Additionally, social class has also been addressed in previous critical works about the Harlem Renaissance. Clearly, race and class are deeply intertwined when evaluating the stories of black Americans in the early twentieth century. Sondra Guttman addresses this in her article “Uncovering the Great Depression,” which asks questions about class and race in a time when all of American society was suffering, not just blacks or whites. In Their Eyes Were Watching God , “Paradoxically, as Janie moves forward in time, she moves backwards in economic circumstance. She goes from being the wife of a free, independent farmer, to being like a slave — a field hand in the muck” (Guttman 97). This is an interesting dilemma, as the writers of the Harlem Renaissance tended to focus on the betterment of the black race, rather than fallbacks. That can surely be said for Fauset, whose main characters in The Chinaberry Tree see financial success throughout the novel and interact with other characters that are doctors, lawyers, and business owners. Guttman notes that, “Hurston points her readers’ attention toward the repetitious nature of the African American historical experience, therefore undermining the linear narratives of progress that mark dominant historical narratives” (98). While other writers, like Fauset, may have put their characters down a line of socioeconomic progress, Hurston does not make that a priority in her writing. This contrast helps the reader to understand the many underlying class issues that the women writers of Harlem Renaissance find themselves conflicted about. Another issue that the Harlem Renaissance writers addressed through literature was the Great Migration, a time in the early 1900s when many black Americans moved from the South to the North, and began working in more industrial jobs rather than Oslica 5 agriculture. This could be the major contrast in the writings of Hurston and Fauset. Fauset portrays a positive, progressive small town of Red Brook, New Jersey in The Chinaberry Tree , where the black characters are prosperous and race, while still a vital part of the story, is limited in its influence. While Hurston herself spent a great deal of time in the North, she saw that “rural black people were being forgotten, disappearing amidst the heady enthusiasm of the urban New Negro Movement,” and used her novels and stories as a way to represent this “forgotten” group of people, particularly the women (Krasner 534). Naturally, the writings of Hurston and Fauset present a lot of issues in relation to gender. Fauset is potentially the more traditional of the two writers, but her characters do tend to show their own agency, and the general consensus is that Hurston’s works portray confident, independent women, adding a feminist angle to her writing. Nonetheless, this can be disputed. While Fauset’s main characters in The Chinaberry Tree , Laurentine and Melissa, are portrayed as successful and modern, the novel’s plot ultimately follow their tracks to marriage. Shawn Miller acknowledges this and calls it “an underacknowledged pattern” in Hurston’s works, which could also apply to Fauset as well (76). The focus of these women’s lives is marriage, and as Miller argues, “Hurston’s novel is at the core a quest narrative whose object is love, a marriage capable of sustaining Janie’s vision of bee and pear tree blossom” (76). The fact that this is such an important part of both the authors’ works arguably shows the limits to which their characters are allowed to develop independently from the expectations of the time. Maybe this was because women’s issues were a controversial part of the Harlem Renaissance. The male writers of the Harlem Renaissance were reluctant to accept their contemporary women writers, setting the stage for a predominantly gendered study of the Harlem Renaissance with a focus on the male Oslica 6 writers. As Wall states, “Engendering the Harlem Renaissance means undoing perimetes that exclude women and their writing… It means expanding thematic and generic boundaries” and while still focusing on race, also acknowledging that race and gender play an equally large role (68).
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